THE BOTTOM LINE

A helpful Perl script gives you an immediate overview of your financial status, adding the balances of multiple accounts and share depots. It even allows users to add their own plugins.

Contrary to popular belief, rich people are not unhappier than people without a penny to their names. You can hear the sighs of relief all over the country – gone are the fears of wealth-induced miserliness. And for the first time in years, people again dare to check their financial status. Read on to find out how. With the exception of a few eccentrics who prefer to horde their wealth under the floorboards of their villas, people are increasingly turning to programs such as Gnucash to manage their accounts and depots. Account management programs help you tidy up your accounts, giving you neat formatting or even graphical output. This said, the open source tools are still very much in the vein of Quicken and Microsoft Money and entail a lot of highly disciplined work.